On Aug 16 2005, Hans du Plooy wrote:
I'll add my voice for this, the Realtek chips (at least the 100mbit
ones) are rubbish. They don't perform well, they're incredibly
sensitive to interference, and they have a habit of not lasting long.
In the mean time, Jeff Garzik (the maintainer of many kernel NIC drivers)
said recently on the lkml that Realtek 8169 is one of his preferred and
better supported cards in Linux, especially due to the supply of
documentation.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2002/11/18/205
Hope this helps, Rogério.